This article outlines the political and philosophical context of the development of Slovenian experimental poetry during the 1960s, and links the concept of the linguistic turn to problematizing the ...referential function in modern poetry. In determining the meanings of the type of experimental poetry that uses words as its main means of expression, one must take into account two extremes: the traditional view on language (according to which words reflect reality) on the one hand, and the complete loss of referential function on the other. Words cannot be ascribed a meaning when they cannot be linked to referents (which occurs in the case of fabricated words), when their use or the play in which they are included cannot be identified (due to syntactic irregularities or semantic anomalies), or when the meaning is deferred because Derrida's play of signifiers is at the forefront. The four Slovenian poets discussed in this article in terms of experimental poetry dealt with the language issue with various intensity. The referential function was absolutely rejected by Iztok Geister and Niko Grafenauer in their poetry studies texts; Franci Zagoricnik rejected it most radically in his glossolalic poetic texts, whereas Tomaz Salamun merely indicated the potential linguistic turn. Geister's exploration of the semantic links between words that are free of conventional usage is substantiated in his criticism of humanism. Grafenauer began creating emotionally charged structures because he rejected the sense and reestablished poetry as an autonomous aesthetic phenomenon; his poems can be ascribed a social-critical role, just like Zagoricnik's experiments and, last but not least, Salamun's poetry of fragments. What the four poets have in common is their distance from the modern world of consumption and false ideologies, rather than the modes and radicality of their linguistic turns.
The monograph Iz kaosa kozmos (From Chaos to Cosmos) and the first two books from the Poezija konteksta (Poetry of Context) series explore the poetry created during the period of the Slovenian ...resistance movement and the related revolution during the Second World War (1941-1945). The third and fourth book analyze the poetry created by Slovenians who in the Second World War were forcefully drafted into the German army~Slovenians who lived in the period of the Italian occupation of the Slovenian territory under the 1920 Treaty of Rapallo~and those who were mobilized into the Italian army during WWII.
Odcarani svet Boza Voduska Bernik, France
Primerjalna književnost,
12/2012, Volume:
35, Issue:
3
Journal Article
This article discusses a literary phenomenon that is oriented utterly subjectively in terms of the concept and content, even though as a whole it is not alienated from the given time and space. When ...it was published, it aroused a number of varied emotional responses. This is also undoubtedly because it was precisely during this time that the author's personal identity was changing and changed. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Kosovel in nadrealizem Vrecko, Janez
Primerjalna književnost,
12/2011, Volume:
34, Issue:
3
Journal Article
This article takes issue with the hypotheses that tried to connect Kosovel only to Italian futurism or with surrealism, and shows that their authors were not familiar with constructivist poetics. ...This means they consciously ignore the numerous places in Kosovel's work that reflect his thorough knowledge of Russian and Berlin constructivism. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Srečko Kosovel (1904–1926) died too young to publish a collection of poetry. He left only a wealth of manuscripts, most of which are hardly legible. Therefore Anton Ocvirk needed decades to decipher ...Kosovel's manuscripts and collect and publish his collected work. But after a thorough review of Kosovel manuscripts it became clear that some poems were missing in Ocvirk's edition. They are now critically presented in this book.
Using the approaches of semiotics and text linguistics, Žerjal-Pavlin’s monograph deals with Slovenian lyrical cycles from romanticism to postmodernism. They are understood as secondary texts ...composed of primary texts with the intention of expanding the horizons of the textual world and, within them, further intertextually supplementing the meanings of individual texts, thereby generating a new semantic potential of the cyclic whole. Due to the intersubjectivity of textual criteria and dynamic conventions of the literary system, the lyrical cycle cannot be defined with precision. Several variables are in play: intra- and intertextual coherence, the title and the outer form, and literary conventions (such as poetry collections). Two types of the cyclic composition are distinguished: the syntagmatic and paradigmatic, the former tending towards the epical. In the first variety, the elements are arranged either in a narrative manner or they treat the theme thorugh causal relationships between the poems. The cycles of the paradigmatic type use variation to express the same theme or motive in different perspectives or contexts. The monograph also addresses problems in distinguishing the lyric cycle from the lyric poem, the sonnet wreath, and similar supra-textual compositions.
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